Back in the 1970s, citizen band (CB) radios were all the rage. I remember scores of friends and family members racing to their favorite electronics provider in order to pick up a CB radio to use in their automobiles.

One of the most-used phrases in the CB radio era had to be "10-4 good buddy," which was a common way to end those over-the-public-airwaves conversations. When I noticed the latest release of GitLab was version 10.4, my mind raced back to that late 70s phrase, hoping that GitLab's 10.4 delivered on some good updates.

GitLab 10.4 Released

Sure enough, setting aside those 1970s memories, the 10.4 Release of GitLab promises some solid features and functionality:

Support for Epics - GitLab is now including the idea of an Epic within the issue side of their solution. As a result, it is now possible to associate and group issues together - similar to how the Epic concept is applied within standard Agile teams.

Single-click deploy of Prometheus on Kubernetes - monitoring your application has become easier, with GitLab's ability to deploy Prometheus on Kubernetes with a single-click. As a result, metrics like processor and memory utilization are pulled from Kubernetes with latency and throughput available via a supported ingress.

Kubernetes Cluster Integration - GitLab clusters are now available with 10.4 - using the new Clusters page (under CI/CD), or via Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Existing clusters can be connected as well.

Run Scheduled Pipelines Manually - while scheduled pipelines are a powerful aspect of GitLab, the ability to run a scheduled pipeline manually did not exist ... until version 10.4. Now, use of the "play" button within the web interface will launch scheduled jobs when desired.

Performance Improvements - each GitLab release has an aspect of performance improvements included with the code base. Some of the performance improvements within 10.4 include:

Plus, More Features & Functionality

The items above reflect the top seven aspects of version 10.4 that I wanted to bring forth in this article. Additional features and functionality can be found here.

GitLab continues to deliver features and functionality to an already solid and proven product. If you are looking for an enterprise-ready solution for your source control, GitLab should certainly be on your short list to review.